Do I need a 10 or 15k rpm drive, or is 7200 sufficient?

[Kendog]

I'm soon upgrading to an Athlon 2000 with 512 MB SDRAM for serious audio recording, and I'm hung on one decision... Do I need a 10k or 15k rpm hard drive, to go with my 2 20 gig 7200s? I'm just not sure where this system will bottleneck.

Fast hard drives are cool, of course, but will it be a waste of money? I'm doing tons of 20 to 40 track mixes with tons of fx ranging from DSP-FX (solid and easy on the processing) to Waves Gold (most power-hungry I've found). I'm recording mostly live instruments with some vocal tracks, or Hip-hop/R&B with tons of vocal tracks, so the processing is really heavy.

Here are my approximate choices:

120 GB @ 7200... $200
36 GB @ 10000... $200
18.4 GB @ 15000... $280

SCSI or EIDE are both OK, and if it matters, I'm running Samplitude producer.

Thanks for your help

 

[Henry Low]

100+gig 15k rpm HDs costs alot morethen 280 dollars

U could put two 60gig 7200 rpm HDs in Raid configs to get extra speed but you will still have only 60 gigs of space. But u get the extra security that if one hd fails, the other will still be there to back you up. Two 7200 rpms from my experience are also quieter then 10-15k HDs

Raid configuration is the way to go for price/performance/reliability.

 

[Kendog]

My bad - that should have read 18.4 Gig, not 118.4 - now THAT would be a damn good deal, huh?

 

[Dolemite]

5400 rpm drives are usually sufficient. A recent model like the Maxtor D540X will do 40 tracks of 24-bit 96 kHz audio. They're also cheaper and quieter.

Raid configuration is the way to go for price/performance/reliability.

Raid0, as I think you're referring to, does not increase reliability. In fact, its pretty unreliable. One stripe gets screwed up and you're likely to lose all your data.

Raid0+1 uses both striping and mirroring, but requires 4 seperate drives. This would be faster and reliable, but simply impractical in most cases.

Get one fast drive for everything, or if you're looking for a bit more performance, get a separate fast drive for audio.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

7200 is fine. Absolutely positively fine.

5400 is also fine, but I always had more hiccups....just pusing it a little too close. Besides, a 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor drive is $80 (check pricewatch) so 5400RPM should only be an option for backup.

If you're going to put money into SCSI then then you should really have a very good reason. I have never seen a case in which a modern DAW system was hindered by hard drive performance before it was hindered by the processor or software.

IDE RAID is not worth the headache on a DAW. I would only consider it for redundancy, not for speed, unless you can afford four drives. Now if we were talking about video, that'd be a different story.

Do you realize how many 24bit 96khz tracks can fit into the 25-30MB/sec sustained transfer of a good 7200RPM hard drive?

3bytes * 96000 samples =288,000 bytes per second
25,000,000 Bps / 288,000 Bps = 86

86 24/96 tracks. I'd be a hell of a lot more worried about the rest of my system. You'll have CPU, chipset, and soundcard problems well before you're going to have HD problems, as long as you've got a good drive & controller. Heck, consider all the 24/96 standalone systems out there by mackie and others...they all use a single IDE drive, and I believe they'll work with both 5400 and 7200RPM drives.

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Kendog]

Thanks.

Thanks, everybody. I'll move happily into my 7200 rpm 120 G drive. Enough for me and all my friends and relatives (at least for now).